A web log, or “blog,” is a an internet site, or page(s) within a larger site, where a writer writes, or blogs, about topics of interest to the writer. Blog writers are typically referred to as “bloggers,” and the electronic world of blogs, generally referred to as the “blogosphere,” is rapidly expanding.
Every day, huge numbers of new blogs are created, and a even greater number are posted to or updated. As recently as 2006, estimates placed the number of blog posts as high as 1.2 million per day. Of these, 75,000 were newly created blogs. This increased blogging activity presents an excellent opportunity for corporations and other product and/or service providers to expand their marketing efforts.
Blogs present a unique opportunity for the public, including potential clients and customers, to get a candid view of employer practices, ethics and viewpoints. If used in an appropriate manner, blogs can be an invaluable tool to gain customers, educate clients, and increase market penetration.
Traditional blogs of the past few years typically involve the blogging efforts of an individual blogger creating and posting information to his or her own blog. This information is then typically accessed by a searcher of the Internet to identify the posted blog content via search, or whereby a searcher is directed to the blog content by the blogger. In addition, the information prepared and posted by the blogger is not used elsewhere, so the bloggers efforts are limited to a single forum.
Traditional blogs pose a number of problems that are solved by the disclosure of the present application. For example, if an individual blogger is also an employee of a company, and the blogger posts information related to the company's field to his or her own personal blog, the company may receive no benefit to those efforts as the personal blog content is not affiliated with the company. The disclosure of the present application solves that problem by providing a system and method for preparing a “compended” blog, which may comprise a compilation of posts from several individual blogs, a single post being posted to several compended blogs, or a combination thereof. For example, if a compended blog is created relating to automobile design, and an employee of an automobile design firm blogs to her individual blog relating to automobile design, a system and/or method of the present disclosure would allow the content from the individual blog to be posted on the compended blog based on at least one selected keyword, for example, which may be the incorporation of the words “automobile” and “design” within the individual blog post.
An additional problem created by individual blogs is described by way of the following example. In one example, a software company may have, for example, 50 different employee-bloggers, each of which maintaining their own personal blogs relating to an aspect of software design, creation, and implementation. The company, however, may have an interest in benefiting from these efforts, but has no mechanism to compile the information contained within those 50 individual blogs into a format useful to a potential customer or client interested in those aspects of software. At least one system and/or method of the present disclosure solves this problem by, for example, creating one or more compended blogs for specific aspects of software, whereby content from the 50 individual blogs, once affiliated with or accessible by the compended blog(s), may be placed on the compended blog(s) themselves. For example, the company may create a “software design” compended blog, and content created by the individual blogger-employee may, if one or more predetermined criteria are met (keyword matches, for example), may then additionally be posted to the “software design” blog for the benefit of the company.
As such, it would be beneficial to have a system and/or method for preparing and/or maintaining compended blogs to overcome these, and potentially other, shortcomings relating to traditional blogs.